Because of severe problems with Harvard’s Manila blog server, the weblogmasters had to turn the server off a few days ago. They are working on getting it going well enough to give people with weblogs on it the opportunity to get their content back and migrate to WordPress. They aren’t exactly sure when they’ll have the server running again. They should be able to keep it up for about two weeks to give people the opportunity to get their content. They realize it’s a very short time to do all of that work, but in this urgent and severe situation, they’re doing the best they can do.

We will have a special meeting at 6 pm on Thursday, March 29, before blog group so I can walk people through the migration process. (Why am I linking to the blog when you can’t get to it while the server is down?) The meeting will be in the conference room of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society on the 2nd floor of 23 Everett Street, Cambridge.

In light of these new server problems, I feel relieved about moving j’s scratchpad over here last month, but I’m going to need some way to get my content off the Manila server in a format I can use to continue the work of darning the imported version’s gaps. I have a partial backup I can use from when I ran Wget in December overnight. Does anyone have a different and possibly better suggestion for making a copy of the weblog, which has ~6,000 items on it? I’m happy to work with text, HTML, and/or XML files. It’s possible I can get a copy from the server administrators, but if I can get one on my own, that’d save them some work while they’re dealing with this crisis.

Please help me spread the word through the Harvard blog community. Notice is short and we’re worried that we might not be able to reach everyone who would like to move their content from Manila to WordPress or get some kind of backup copy.